Why History Matters: L.A. Wildfires Past, Present, and Future

In this week’s episode of then & now, we present a recording of a recent panel discussion focusing on L.A. wildfires past, present, and future. This program is part of the “Why History Matters” series presented by the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Department of History—a series dedicated to the belief that historical knowledge is an indispensable, and often missing, ingredient in public debate.

”Why History Matters: L.A. Wildfires Past, Present, and Future,” brought experts together to explore how historical and indigenous perspectives can reshape our understanding of wildfires, especially in light of the devastating Los Angeles County fires in January 2025. The discussion, anchored in the Fowler Museum at UCLA’s “Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art” exhibition, interrogates prevailing narratives that frame fire solely as a destructive force, instead foregrounding indigenous epistemologies that recognize fire as a vital ecological process and a generational resource. Professors Hitoshi Abe, Gerald Clarke, Jr., and Char Miller distinguish three primary drivers of contemporary wildfire crises: climate change, fire suppression policies, and patterns of urban expansion into fire-prone landscapes. To more effectively mitigate and adapt to the escalating risks posed by wildfires, these panelists discuss ways to integrate traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary land management and urban policy.

Moderator:
Stephen Aron is the Calvin and Marilyn Gross Director and President of the Autry Museum of the American West. A specialist in the history of frontiers, borderlands, and the American West, Dr. Aron holds degrees from Amherst College (B.A.) and the University of California, Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.).

Panelists:
Hitoshi Abe is a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Abe is currently the director of Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies and holds the Terasaki Chair for contemporary Japanese study. In 2017, he established xLAB, an international think tank initiative that examines architecture’s elastic boundaries and considers new possibilities through interdisciplinary collaboration in the study of the future built environment.

Gerald Clarke Jr. is a Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American Relations at the University of California, Riverside. He is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and lives on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation. Gerald oversees the Clarke family cattle ranch and remains heavily involved in Cahuilla culture.

Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College. His teaching and research reflect his fascination with all things environmental. Classes on U.S. environmental history, water in the U.S. West, and public lands management, like those on urbanization and the interplay between the natural and built landscapes, have deeply informed his writing.

Transcript

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Narrator 0:08

Welcome to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

Steve Aron 0:31

I am Steve Aaron. I'm the Calvin and Marylyn Gross Director and President CEO of the Autry Museum. And at least, at least for this evening's program, I'm a former chair of the UCLA history department and now a professor emeritus at UCLA. Now, as some of you may remember, I think there are a couple people who are in the audience then. My last time on a stage at UCLA two years ago, Peter. Peter Evans. I'll tell you, yeah. It's a better stage, right? Anyway, I'm excited about this evening's program because it will, I think, powerfully speak to why history matters, especially now. In the wake of the fires, many museums uh posted their intentions to be, quote, a respite and a resource. Uh and the Los Angeles History Collaborative, it seems to me, uh, and I'm proud that the Autry is one of the founding institutions in it, allows us to make more of our resources by sharing them across institutions and encouraging us to work together to address the challenges we face. More specifically with the pilot project that we're now launched on the LA wildfires, we probe for the lessons we might take, what we might learn from past wildfires in Southern California and elsewhere, how these lessons applied or were not applied to the most recent conflagrations, and what we might do to make sure that the fire next time is not so devastating. The fires next time are not so devastating. I'm also excited because it allowed, I hope, many of you to tour the fire kinship Southern California Native Art and Ecology Exhibition. Among the contributors to the Fire Kinship Exhibition is Gerald Clark. Clark is an enrolled citizen of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and lives in the home his grandfather built on the Cahuilla Reservation, where he oversees the Clark Family Cattle Ranch. I'm not sure we've had a cattle rancher speak at this auditorium before. He is currently a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California Riverside, where he teaches classes in Native American art, history, and culture. In 2007, he was awarded an Idle Drug Museum Fellowship and served as an artist in resident at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 2020, the Palm Springs Art Museum hosted Gerald Clark Falling Rock, the first major retrospective of his work. His work is exhibited at many museums, including, I must add, in several galleries at the Autry Museum. We're also very fortunate to be joined by Char Miller, who is the W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College. I know we've succeeded in luring him west in the past to UCLA. And he didn't curse me today, so the traffic couldn't have been that terrible. And he, the last time I think he was here, he gave a really wonderful presentation that we did in honor of my predecessor at UCLA, Norris Hunley Jr. And Norris was a great historian of Western water and the manipulation of Western waterscapes. And Char gave a great presentation about water. So I suppose it's only fitting that we brought him back to speak about fire as we're thinking along these elements. His most recent books are Natural Consequences, Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril, which was published in 2022, and Burn Scars, a documentary history of fire suppression from the colonial from colonial origins to the resurgence of cultural burning, which is obviously particularly relevant. This came out in 2024 and is particularly relevant to our panel today. And last, but certainly not least, uh Hitoshi Abe, who comes the least distance tonight to be with us. He's a professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA, but whose work in many ways takes us farthest afield. Professor Abe was the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, was the chair of the UCLA history, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Department from 2007 to 2017. Duration that astounds me. No one can survive that long as chair. And is currently the director of the Paul and his and Hisako Tarasaki Center for Japanese Studies and holds the Tarasaki Chair for Contemporary Japanese Studies. And as you'll hear from him this evening, how Japan has responded to natural disasters and reshaped its built environment has much to teach us about how to live in our disaster-prone landscape. So I've asked, for the way just we're going to organize this this evening, I've asked each of the presenters to make five-minute presentations, and I guess it's my job to try to hold you in that limit, to make five-minute initial presentations, laying out what they see as the most important issues they want to bring forward, after which we'll have a discussion on the stage among the panelists, and then we'll open it up for questions from the audience, all keeping within the prescribed time. So I think we'll start with Gerald.

Gerald Clarke 6:09

Well, hello everyone. Happy to be here, happy for the invitation to speak with you tonight. My name is again Gerald Clark, uh enrolled citizen of the KUIA Band of Indians. Uh before I get started, I want to acknowledge the Tongva people. And if there are any Tongva people here, uh be sure to say hi after we get done tonight. I'm always looking to expand my kinship relationships throughout the world. And it's important to acknowledge uh indigenous peoples in the lands uh that they belong. Um secondly, I want to say uh I want to express some sympathy for any of these, uh any of you who may have been uh impacted by the recent fires. It's uh certainly a tragedy, uh, but it's not one that was that we could say was totally unforeseen, I don't think. Um and so with that, I I feel like I'm here to give an indigenous uh kind of perspective on the subject here. And uh some of you were up in the tour earlier, and I think there are two really fundamental differences in an indigenous relationship to fire when compared to, say, the dominant culture here in uh America. And um, as I said upstairs, um for many indigenous people, we we don't see fire as as a destructive element. We we we see fire as part of the local ecology. And for many indigenous uh cultures, uh there is no word in the Kuya language for nature. And uh sometimes people are surprised to hear that. Uh for those of you who may be in child development uh areas, uh, you know, when a child at two or three years old, when they learn the word chair, right? They see this object and they say chair. What they're they're learning the word, but they're also understanding that that object is outside of themselves. It's something beyond them, right? And so for indigenous peoples in my own tribe, uh, we don't see nature as being outside of ourselves. We are nature. Now we have words for every kind of tree, every kind of animal and plant in the wind and such, but we don't have that concept of nature. And um Lowell Bean, a longtime uh anthropologist who worked with my tribe, um, he he described our relationship to the world around us as being this uh reciprocal obligation and that we are only part of the whole working system. And it doesn't revolve around us. We are one of the cogs, right? Along with the animals, along with the plants and the the climate, right? That makes the world work. We are part of that. So, what that that relationship is, is you don't go and take everything from the landscape. You also you know leave uh aspects of it, you know, for for the other beings in the world. Now, the the this concept, I think, is an important one to understand, to understand an indigenous viewpoint of fire. Okay. And I think part of the difference between the dominant culture, the settler culture, and indigenous culture is that we don't see the world around us as a natural resource. And I say that because what is a resource? A resource is something meant to be used. And typically in a capitalist society, it's to be used to build wealth. Okay. And we don't see it that way. We see fire as this element that plants need, that animals need, and the system that was developed over thousands of generations. Can I tell you a little story real quick? I did an artist residency in Vermont, and I kept meeting all these people who, you know, they really play up the founding fathers history over there. And they said they would come to me and they would say, Gerald, my family has been here for five generations, right? And I would be like, oh, welcome. Because this indigenous knowledge has been here for thousands of years, thousands of generations, right? And the what we've developed is what we call traditional ecological knowledge. And you can see evidence of that upstairs in the uh exhibit, okay? And oftentimes Native people are stereotyped as being simply spiritual or intuitive, uh, natural, like one with nature, right? Um, that's all fine and dandy, right? But this traditional ecological knowledge, these ecological practices that were handed down generation upon generation, okay, through observation, right, through experimentation, right? It's awful lot like the scientific method, right? And it's what I call the indigenous intellectual tradition. And those stereotypes of being spiritual, of being intuitive, instinctual, all those stereotypes do is they rob indigenous people of our intellectual traditions, right? And so when you when you go through the show upstairs, I hope you keep that in mind. That's what you're witnessing, that intellectual tradition that's been handed down through generations. I just wanted to show you kind of where where I'm from. So I I think I came the farthest. Uh it was a good two and a half hours uh of traffic to get here. But the the Coeira homeland is uh primarily in Riverside and northern uh San Diego uh County. Uh, I do live on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, which is kind of in the center of that little uh maybe a little bit to the west of uh the uh Salton Sea, but I'm up about 4,000 feet in a very rural area. So I commute when I teach at UC Riverside. And this is just an image of the reservation. So uh we've been dirt roads for a long time, and as Steve said, that uh I uh I run my family's cattle ranch, something that Indian people learned all the way back into the mission period when we were the first cowboys in in uh California. But I want to point out if you look at the the the flora there, you see the lot of lot of uh brush, chemise and different things like that. And then when we compare that to say a historic photo, uh first of all, I think one of the plans now after the fires is to build back in a more sustainable way, but also in materials that aren't flammable. But you see here, traditionally, you know, uh this is a very flammable kind of uh uh building here. But if you can, it's hard to see, but I want to point out that the land is cleared all around it, right? Now we don't have uh photographs when the Portola expedition came through California, right? Uh, but we do have their journals, and they uh typically talked about the health of the environment. They almost referred to California as like a park setting, right? And they actually kind of thought it was like the Garden of Eden, as though this was their reward for coming across the ocean, coming up from Mexico, that this was their gift from God. And indeed, the lands of California were like the Garden of Eden. The only problem is these explorers, right, these settlers, they they didn't understand who the gardeners were. And the gardeners were the indigenous peoples of these lands who would burn the landscape as a productive way of recycling dead material, putting the minerals back into the earth, and keeping the landscape clean. And that's how it's always been uh told to me. This is the way that the Indians clean the landscape. And so fire, right, and a lot of plants need fire in order to uh flourish, right? And so fire was used, and I've I've actually come across um journals, uh settler journals going back to the 17th century, and it's quite funny because they're always complaining. Like every time I turn around, I see an Indian starting a fire, right? And it was kind of seen as this negative thing, but it's because uh the the Native people saw that fire could renew the landscape. And and it seems contradictory. One of the things you see is where cultural burns happen, uh the the amount of groundwater actually increases. So it's it's a whole system and it's built into our minds, it's built in how we see the world. And I look forward to hearing our other speakers and our discussion uh later. So thank you very much.

Char Miller 14:58

My name is Char Miller, I'm from Pomona College, um, and I'm thrilled to be back at UCLA, a public-facing institution in ways that I find uh really wonderful, if not remarkable, in America today. Um, what I want to talk a little bit about is the fires in January as a way to explain not just that moment in time, but the lots of moments that preceded it. So let's think about paradigms as one way to get at this story. And let's think about three of them. They are in collision, and what we saw erupt in January is the explosion that this collision produced. But I can show you back to the 1920s, similar kinds of explosions emerged in similar ways. Uh, there just weren't people there. So hold on to that thought because here's the three paradigms I want us to play with. The first of which is obviously climate change, climate disruption, that has so transformed the way in which this planet operates that one of the things that it does is as act as an accelerant. Think of it as kerosene, think of it as fuel poured onto a fire. Um, because one of the ways for us to understand that accelerant is to understand the most recent history of California since 2003. And for an historian, that's yesterday, uh, maybe 10 minutes ago. But since 2003, think of these three facts. Nineteen of the 20 largest fires in California history erupted between 2003 and 2025. 18 of the most damaging 20 fires occurred in that same time period. 13 of the most fatal fires occurred at that same moment. So climate disruption has really triggered in wildfire history a moment that has never existed in this state's past. And I want to reference Gerald's comment because indeed, if you go back into Crispy's journals and others, and you start to calculate what the Spanish were witnessing, which was fire everywhere, which is why they called San Diego Bay the Bay of Smoke. It was just inundated with fire. The Forest Service calculates, depending on the ecosystem, four to ten percent of the state was burned every year. Every year. We don't come anywhere close to that, but these are managed fires as opposed to the explosive ones that we've seen since 2003. That's paradigm one. Paradigm two is the very issue that Gerald raised about fire suppression. It's the Spanish that started this process, that prohibited by law, that attacked those who used it. They were happy using fire themselves, but anybody else meant that, as one of the missionaries said, what we must do is to denaturalize, denaturalize the indigenous people, by which he meant take fire out of their hands and so that they will be the converts, both labor and religious, for this for the Catholic Church. But you have to denaturalize them. The Forest Service simply picks up on that language, and Smoky Bear is an expression of that process, where it then in the late 19th, early 20th century, articulated this paradigm, which is all fire anywhere is bad. They knew otherwise, by the way. Their scientists and even Gifford Pinchot, the founder, founding chief of the agency, understood that fire was necessary to regenerate Lodgepole Pine, to regenerate other pine species and other tree species around the country. Just not on their watch, please. It's beginning in the early part of the 20th century that that dynamic occurred. The Forest Service then doubled down in 1930 and argued that every fire, every smoke that was witnessed at one day must be extinguished by 10 a.m. the next. And if it wasn't, then the next day at 10 o'clock. And if it wasn't that time, 10 a.m. There's a metric here and also a pressure to put out fire everywhere because all fire is bad. The third paradigm is what happens when you have fire suppression for more than a century, roughly. You have a climate that has disrupted, and so those two are in conversation with one another, and then you add a third of which LA is a remarkable expression, but not the only one. That paradigm is that all growth is good growth. So that every housing subdivision that can be developed will be developed, regardless of where it's being developed. So city councils, county commissioners, and others will green light projects in Southern California, as in Denver, as in Albuquerque, as anywhere else in the West that burns, don't be surprised when the structures that are incinerated are in places that are of high severity fire zones or even medium severity fire zones. Because from a political point of view, growth is housing, housing is necessary, and therefore we'll build on a ridgeline, we'll build in a foothill, we'll build in a canyon, we'll build anywhere we want to, and if the topography doesn't work, we'll bring out the bulldozers and make it work. So take that sprawling density, which is really emblematic in LA. It used to be just sprawl, now it's sprawling density. That's why Los Angeles County is the second most dense place in the country. Put that human geography into places that are supposed to burn that haven't burned because of fire suppression, and then you add the accelerant of climate change. And what happened in January is perfectly explainable. It's horrifying, but it's perfectly explicable. We can understand that at the base of it, the fossil fuels that we have burned have gone up into the sky and come back to us in fire. And if you think about that today, those days, a gust moving at 100 miles an hour. If you look at the photographs that the LA Times published, what you saw wasn't just embers moving at 100 miles an hour. You saw a wind that was fire. It didn't just carry fire, it was fire. It was moving at one mile every six minutes, which is about as long as Steve gave us the talk. That's what we have done to ourselves. Thanks very much.

Hitoshi Abe 22:01

So, why do we forget the past? Forgetting is certainly the necessary part of life, but we also seem to forget many things we should not. In 2011, a massive magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent large tsunami caused extensive damage in the Tokyo region of Japan. This earthquake was the largest earthquake in Japan in recorded history, and the tsunami was once in a thousand years in magnitude. However, this area has long been regularly damaged by numerous tsunamis. And even tsunami of this magnitude occurred once before 1200 years ago. This is evidenced by the numerous stone monuments that have been erected in the area at the various times in the history. This is Jogang Earthquake and Tsunami Monument Fund in the field of Hingashi Matsushima City in Miyagi Prefecture. The text is now on and difficult to read, but it tells a big earthquake and tsunami that occurred in 869. Located 10 meters above sea level, the monument has elected to indicate that the area lower than the monument would be subject to tsunami damage. This is a great tsunami monument in Miyako City, Iwate Prefecture. The people of 100 years ago are trying to tell us not to build houses lower than this monument and not to forget about this disaster. There are indeed more than 300 stone monuments scattered in various locations in this area. There are so many messages from the past trying to combin the danger of earthquake and tsunami. However, considering the damage in 2011, it must be said that these messages have been forgotten and ignored. Each region of the world has a variety of unique disasters depending on its local characteristics. As you know, in Los Angeles, this is the case with a forest fire. This is a diagram showing the location of the fire in Los Angeles County since 1933. You can see that they have occurred in many locations that scale is also expanding. This is another solution of the history of fire in Los Angeles. You can see that each year the number of forest fires has increased, the area burned has expanded, and the cost of fire suppression has increased. Especially in the year of 2000 and 2020, you can see that the damage caused by a fire has increased dramatically. Now high fire has become part of our daily lives. And let's look at the interesting fact that we can learn from the history of recent history of forest fire. August 2017, Tubbs Fire. November 18th, campfire. And the Palisade Fire this past January. This disaster caused the largest damage in the history of the city of Los Angeles. But looking at these pictures, do you notice a very interesting point? When you we think of forest fire, we have an image of trees burning and our homes burning as they are engulfed by the uh tree fires. However, when you we look at this aerial photo of the these fire damaged towns, we notice that the houses have burned to the ground, but most trees are remains standing. This photo by Jack Cohen shows an interesting phenomenon when forest fires switch to the oven fire. In the photo on the left, the trees on the right has burned down, while the trees on the left has not, and conversely, the house underneath it has burned to the ground. So this indicates that the forest fire, which had been burned, the trees from left side has stopped by the road in the middle, but the umber jumped over the roads and spread from house to house, transforming into almond fire. The three aerial photos of the fire I showed demonstrate the nature of the fire spreading from house to house and served as evidence that the house and their surrounding environments are more flammable than trees. So the based on this interesting uh observation, it is clear that what is needed to protect our town from forest fire is not only to deal with uh with this natural phenomena which are part of the California ecology, but more strongly to design each dwelling unit to be less flammable and probably maintain and manage the environment around our homes daily. So, in order to maintain the damage caused by the forest fire, it is important to accept that the fire are part of our everyday life. Prepare for them on a daily basis and never forget about them. It might seem obvious, but we tend to forget so many things we should not, like a stone monument in Japan. Let's step away from Los Angeles and look at the world of disaster today. This video summarizes natural disaster worldwide based on the data from Mirai Khan in Japan. This map indicates significant earthquake that occurred worldwide during the year 2010. So basically the earth is constantly shaking. And these are the pictures of the earthquake happened in the recent years. The second map indicates the propagation of the tsunami during the Great East Japan earthquake that travels through the oceans and impacts the other side of the globe. So the last map shows the forest fire that occurs worldwide during the year 2009. It is also safe to say that the Earth is constantly burning. As a human territory expands, we must find a way to coexist with this natural condition. Like this video and two disaster-related stories I have shared with you today tells that our daily lives are inextricably linked to the natural disasters. And that recognizing this is a first step in disaster preparedness as well as the importance of telling the history of these disasters. Thank you.

Steve Aron 29:50

Thank you for those really wonderful presentations. So uh there's a lot of things to follow up on there. Um but I maybe we would start with one thing that just as a starting point, what Gerald said right at the start of the talk, which of course was when he said the fires were were not, I think your quote was not totally unforeseen. And in fact, I think then listening to you know to Char's presentation, Hitoshi's presentation, not only were the night totally unforeseen, but they were entirely predictable. And in fact, going then back, Char to your three paradigms, um, not only are they entirely were they entirely predictable or the the tsunami stones, you know, if you build below this line, beware. But maybe um starting with you, and because you've made a lot about word with Gerald with about words. Um and you made the point that there was not, um, I think really powerful point about that there was no word for nature, um, and that it was also um diminishing of the indigenous intellectual tradition to then reduce everything into sort of quote native spirituality and so forth, and to not see this as part of a an indigenous traditional ecological knowledge that really has important lessons for us. But I guess one point that I just wanted to clarify there's no word for nature. What kind of how many words are there to go back to this sort of an example that's always famous? How many words or different words are there for fire?

Gerald Clarke 31:19

There are several, actually. Uh coot, uh, and if you it's actually mentioned upstairs in the exhibit, but there are several, and typically there would be a fire person who was knowledgeable about the behaviors of fire within the tribal community who would then determine when the time was right to do these control burns. And and actually, uh, I was just mentioned earlier that uh just a couple weeks ago, uh, my tribe did a control burn over an area of uh plant uh material called junkus that they use in basket weaving, and that the basket weavers were have been uh requesting this for uh at least two decades. And every time we set out to do this, uh it was either the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Cal Fire, or Riverside County Fire who would try to shut it down. Because, again, this idea of fire being this destructive element.

Steve Aron 32:11

So just um just a quick follow-up on the fire being a destructive element. One of the critiques, um I have I'm not gonna mention the person's name, though some of you know who it is, uh, who's a member of the Autry Board of Trustees who lives in New Mexico, was decrying when the government got involved in controlled burns, they effed it up and that it got out of control, and this was the cause of great conflagrations around Santa Fe. What is it that Native practitioners of controlled burns know that evidently the United States government has not mastered?

Gerald Clarke 32:44

You know, I I think we can all agree the American way is not based on long-term relationships, but short-term gains, right? And I think this what I'm talking about, this traditional ecological knowledge, this is thousands of years of observation, experimentation, and understanding of the world around us. Uh, I teach uh classes at UCR. I'll ask my students, uh, close your eyes and everyone point north. Guess how many people can actually do it today? Not very many. It's because contemporary Americans have lost a relationship with the outside world. And so it makes sense, right? That they don't understand. And so these fire leaders that I speak of, that knowledge goes back and it was handed down generation upon generation. So there, I think the now the climate change is for real. I I run my family's cattle ranch. I see it on a daily basis, right? But I think um that knowledge has been lost. I see LA Times, I see Huffington Post uh doing articles about the powers of indigenous knowledge and cultural burning. I think right now it's just word service, right? And it's gonna take it's gonna take just as long for us to relearn this knowledge that's been shut down uh as Char said for a couple centuries now.

Steve Aron 34:03

So speaking about the shutting down, Char, since you've written a book about that effort to suppress going back from the Spanish starting it, uh, but then continuing, obviously, and intensifying, and especially over the last century, I mean, maybe a little bit more history here in terms of like you mentioned Gifford Pinchot, for example, and the founding of the U.S. Forest Service, with all sorts of kind of what they thought were good ecological, progressive notions about managing the environment uh for the betterment of all. Why did that go so terribly wrong?

Char Miller 34:35

Oh God, how much time do you have? Two minutes. Um let me give you the accelerated version then. Um they always knew that fire was essential, and I made that point. Gifford Pinchot published a piece in National Geographic in 1899, just before the Forest Service, in the first four years before it was started, in which he goes through species by species where fire was necessary. The last sentence of this piece goes, but this of course has nothing to do with how we deal with the forest fires in the West today. So politics trumped, you should forgive me, science. At the very outset of a suppressive notion, you have agreed that the science says one thing, and you've stated that more important is the political notion, the perception of fire was more important. And so what I tried to do in Bern Scars is twofold. One of which is to get indigenous voices in there, and there are some remarkable indigenous contemporary fire managers who wrote for the book, but also to show two things. One of which is how you build this paradigm such that they're inside the agency and they knew they were wrong, could not speak about why they were wrong. It's pretty powerful internal mechanisms, social control. But there were those on the outside, non-indigenous ranchers, miners, and loggers, all of whom said fire is absolutely essential and we will practice it. And then the third sort of force is the indigenous folks themselves. Every one of the fire managers who wrote for this book told the story about how they became a fire manager. They either learned it from their aunt or their grandmother, they learned it from their great-grandfather who learned it from his great-grandfather or grandmother, and they told the story of how oral history superseded the suppressive actions of the Spanish and the federal government. So there is, there's every paradigm bears the seeds of its own destruction. And here we can see it on multiple levels from indigenous and non-indigenous sources slowly going. And I told Gerald this story, and I'll end on that. In 1924, uh the mission band in San Jacinto sent a letter to Calvin Coolidge in the aftermath of a really bad fire season in the San Gabriel Mountains. So those mountains. North. They told him. Yeah, no, I know. They're transverse, they're always north. They said to Coolidge, You don't know how to manage fire, we do, give the land back. The response came back from the Department of Agriculture through the Forest Service, which was join us, learn our techniques, and you can help us fight fire, which obviously missed the whole point. The point, though, ultimately is there was a demand about sovereignty and resilience on the part of an indigenous group in Southern California that understood what was going on in 1924. Here we are a century later, and we haven't yet figured it out.

Steve Aron 37:57

So you who were not the historian on the panel asked, I think, the you know, the immediate historian's question, which is why do we forget all of this? You know, um, you know, you gave us all this evidence and the recall and the the fact that people were trying to memorialize all of these things so that it wouldn't be forgotten. And yet, as you say, and maybe it goes back to Char's version of if you have um development-minded officials who are determined to let people do what they want or build where they want, and so forth. But I mean, what's I I'm not sure how you answer this, but what's the No, the many things that we learn from this disaster.

Hitoshi Abe 38:43

I was involved with this uh reconstruction uh of Tohoke region after tsunami. And uh what people want is to get back to where they were, forget about this horrible past, which I understandable, but then what happens is they will actually make nature as a guilty one. And then the best way is like one of the horrible things, they build a gigantic seawall so you cannot see ocean even though you are living by it. So that's the kind of uh scary part that uh we try to kind of uh uh alienate ourselves from nature and then kind of try to stay within this safe kind of uh zone. But the problem is as you see in the fire example, I hear lots of people saying, let's cut the trees. But actually, tree is not the one. Your house is the one. So you have to really see that the accept the natural phenomena, and you have to kind of uh deal with it every day. I think that's okay.

Steve Aron 39:54

So actually, I'm yeah, I'm looking at a person in the audience sitting in row three there, who uh lives in Topanga Canyon, um, and who is always being told where he needs to cut his trees back to. What should he do?

Hitoshi Abe 40:08

You know, there's uh I don't know what kind of house, but uh most of the case the the house we have here is kind of vulnerable, especially the the if you don't read there's uh actually there's a diagram showing some kind of perimeter around the house that what kind of material you should use, so that the umber, which is a cause of the most of the fire, cannot ignite the house. But uh that takes like everyday's care and uh attention to those.

Steve Aron 40:46

So well, okay. So, I mean, I guess you don't have to cut all your trees down. In fact, because one of the things you made the point is this look at how interesting it is, these trees didn't burn, houses burn, but the trees are intact in certain places, and that's why this wasn't, in a sense, a forest fire. You know, it's a structure fire. So maybe part of the answer is the kinds of structures we build, part of the answer is the kind of foliage.

Hitoshi Abe 41:08

So the house ignites the houses and then it jumps, actually.

Steve Aron 41:14

So I guess um, you know, one question is, you know, okay, does it come down to political decisions, but also does it come where does you know the money come into the play? So I think one of the remarkable stories out of the Palisades fires was, you know, the ways in which the Getty Villa in the heart of a zone that burned up obviously remained intact. You know, one lesson being okay, they had the right kind of treescape and they could afford to cut it back, and then they had the right kind of um, you know, sort of architecture uh and building materials to keep intact something in a zone that was otherwise um destroyed. So, how much of that is about just about that they had the money to do it right, or how much is about that you know there are certain rules that one should follow when building in what you described in your the third part of your paradigm, building in places where you shouldn't be building.

Char Miller 42:08

And it's basically oh good. Thank God. Okay, so here's here's a way to think about um what happened in January um and why that emotional impulse to go back to the place were nests, we're nesters. We want to go back to the thing that we loved and and and the emotional tenor of that landscape. Totally understand that. It's the absolute last thing as a policy, a mayor or a governor should commit to. I get why they did it. It's absolutely the wrong thing to do because what you what what what we have been told is that you can build like for like plus 10%. So you can build exactly what you had before plus 10% bigger in a place that just was incinerated, and given our disaster amnesia, let's not forget that in December there was a fire in the Santa Monica Mountains, and in November there was a fire in the Santa Ca Mountains. The Woolsey Fire, the Thomas Fire all have burned in those landscapes as well in 2017 and 18. We should not have been surprised. Every single fire is a smoke signal that we managed to ignore, and the policy then to rebuild is to rebuild so that we burn again. If a government's job is to protect the health and safety of its residents, then why are we building back exactly the way we do now? This fire may consume 300 to 400 million dollars. Give me 50 billion, excuse me. Give me 50 of that and let me go into the Palisades and Eaton neighborhoods and ask who wants actually to rebuild or if I could buy them out. Not to rebuild. To open up those landscapes, to dedensify them on the one hand. And to pull people out as a buffer at 100 mile an hour winds, I don't care how big your defensible space is, it isn't going to stop what happened. But it might give you more than six minutes to get out. And then the end, isn't that what the government should do? Help us protect ourselves. And also, because this is something that drives me up the frickin' wall. We build in places that are really tough to get into, have a single road in and out, and we expect to be able to get out at the same time a fire truck is going in. What's our moral responsibility to the people who are coming to protect our property, let alone our lives? And I'm living, I live in Claremont. We've got uh uh uh hundred-acre potential high luxe homes, whatever the hell that means, five million dollars in a high severity fire zone, and they want to build it. And I'm looking at that going, it's already burned five times in the last 20 years. Why would anybody, state or otherwise, agree to do this up a single narrow canyon? I know what the end result will be. Hand out toe tags to people who buy up there, but we shouldn't do this. We're doing it to ourselves in the big sense, in the big systematic sense, and we're doing it to ourselves because individually we really want to live there. And I get it. But it's bad policy.

Steve Aron 45:27

So I'm gonna open it up for questions from the audience in a moment. I guess we have a couple of microphones that we want people to come up to, but um, while if someone's coming up, if you want to come up, um and I'm gonna go back to you, Gerald.

Speaker 1 45:39

Hi, great presentations, really succinct, very nicely put. Um, I have a question about um alternatives, and there's all the work that was done at Riverside by Richard Minich about looking at Baja California, comparing that to San Diego, and that's clearly another model in a similar landscape. So um I guess I ask about is is is that an option? And also, are there other areas around the world that you would hold up, any of the panelists hold up as models for how we could plan more uh more effectively? Uh and that uh areas that we know some about Baja, but maybe some other some other areas that you know about that that I and other people do not. Thank you.

Char Miller 46:23

Um so the dilemma of Minich's arguments, which is Baja doesn't have the problems that Southern California has, is that Baja doesn't have 20 million people, 25 million people. Uh that raises all sorts of other issues that we have to deal with. The more similar kind of place I would say is Sydney, Australia. Uh there are five ecosystems, five Mediterranean zone ecosystems in the world. The Mediterranean, obviously, Southern California, Chile, um, uh, Australia, and South Africa, and there are other places as well that are sort of similar. Um, and Sydney has done, so I guess the way to say this is Sydney is as bad as we are. Um they have had enormous problems with uh peripheral development burning, pushing out into the places from which fire erupts naturally. Um and they haven't done much better than we have done, uh, which is why I was on Australian television a lot uh in January, um, because they were seeing themselves. It was just like a mirror image. Um, and and when they burn, we should be able to see that. Um, and it goes back to 1869, eight sixty-nine and those stones. We know what not to do, and just we just this is why being an historian is so damn frustrating. Because everybody forgets, everybody forgets, including historians. Um, so so um there isn't an answer. I have an answer, but but you know that that that's a pipe dream.

Steve Aron 47:58

Well, hold your pipe dream for one second. I'll give everyone a pipe dream at the end. Go ahead.

Hitoshi Abe 48:02

No, no, I mean about the fire. Um I think what's important is of course, you know, there's a large sort of a strategy talking about creating fire buffer zone between you know the nature and the wild uh you know urban interface, so on and so on. And also prescribed burning and so on. That that's but um many things that uh now we are trying to do is to increase the disaster preparedness among the each individual. And uh there's uh uh in Japan we have uh uh this kind of a fire department creating virtual sort of a kind of uh uh experience. So you can wear these virtual things and you can simulate the situation in fire and how you prepare and such things. I think like it's very important that the many sort of uh uh uh educational institutions can help to basically uh educate people to prepare for the disaster and just change their mentality. So disaster is not uh some sort of an emergency situation that happens once in a lifetime, it's always there. And how to just prepare yourself is important, like actually indigenous people actually were as feeding fire as day-to-day kind of uh phenomena.

Steve Aron 49:33

Other questions? Yeah, please. Come on up, yeah.

Speaker 2 49:37

You know, cities aren't going away, so I don't know if you can answer this question, but which is the what what's the answer? Low density or high density laws?

Char Miller 49:48

Build up, not out.

Speaker 2 49:50

Build up, not out, but that's high density, right? Yeah, okay.

Char Miller 49:54

If you want to reduce water consumption, build up. Amsterdam uses 69 gallons per person per day. Anyone want to guess what we do? At least double that. If you build up, as they have, all sorts of resources become less necessary at large quantities. You have a lawn, you're already up about 200 gallons a day in the summer. And upwards of 60% of all water in Southern California and Texas and elsewhere is thrown onto a lawn or into a swimming pool. It's a waste. So up, not out. And that actually solves our problem here in terms of foothills, canyons, and ridgelines. Pull people down to the valleys where there are fire hydrants.

Speaker 3 50:46

Yeah, I had a question, uh Char, you said it's the policy now to build back plus 10 percent. And I was wondering uh who is saying that? Is it the state, the county, uh the mayor, Mayor Bass, and the governor?

Char Miller 51:04

Yeah. And the county also.

Speaker 3 51:07

Yeah, because I mean uh Eaton fires in the county. So both of them are saying are adopted this policy. They've they've ignored uh uh input from ecologists and others, they just blew it off, that's what happened.

Char Miller 51:24

Um they didn't wait to hear any different voices. I mean, and I get it. They're in the midst of of a firefight, and they're not gonna say to the people who fled, you can't go back.

Steve Aron 51:40

Any other questions? Please find out.

Char Miller 51:41

Yeah.

Speaker 4 51:48

Thank you for your presentation. Um, we just had the fire disaster, and now I'm thinking post. Um, now we have a traffic disaster, along with a lot of other things regarding garbage and um needing to clean up. Um that's the whole other part. So my question is um what I guess with the future generations, like what jobs should we do, or what jobs are coming up, or what things should we begin to invest within ourselves? Because um I have a lot of people who are laborers and uh they're just trying to figure out where they should reinvest because they're not gonna be constructing right now. It's a lot of cleanup. And so yeah. Thank you.

Hitoshi Abe 52:33

I sorry, I mean I don't know how to answer that, but uh that's a great question. You know, the what happens is that uh right now we are consuming so many stuff that Earth actually accumulated to maintain what we are, but now probably we don't have that much of luxury to do that. That means we have to kind of create some sort of a circular ecology to make it work. So somewhere along there, I recommend if you can be involved with something that kind of creates this actual circular ecology, maybe that's one strategy. So for instance, the I'm an architect, we built so much stuff, but now maybe there's an opportunity when you actually de-install the building and turn it back to the resource because the the construction is the most guilty sort of uh industry basically creating so much CO2s and other stuff.

Speaker 5 53:52

Thank you guys so much. Uh, this has been very interesting. I grew up in Sonoma County in a middle of the woods, so I'm very familiar with fire. And I think it's really interesting that so few people seem to, first off, have any advice for people, like talking about building. There's a lot of things people can do to harden their homes. Not everything is as, you know, um successful, but metal roofs, putting vents on your house, so the embers cannot get into your house is huge. We have these, they melt if an ember comes up to our house, fireproof paint. Um, but I think the really interesting thing that nobody's touched on today is we're saying, oh, you know, they're saying you can rebuild your house and all that, but if there's no insurance left, because the fare plan is now bankrupt, which they haven't told us, but it's only had 300 million in liabilities. We now know that this last fire alone is in the billions. And so it's really going to come down to the California taxpayer bailing us out since we know the feds are not coming to help us. So I think that my question would be: how do you see this future that we're quickly moving into where there is no insurance for housing? Because insurance markets do believe in global warming, while our government doesn't, at least federally. Um, and so I think that we're gonna have to be moving out of these places where people will live with no insurance. And so, how do you guys see this future that we're quickly moving into that politics won't really have any effect on it because it's going to be the market that dictates, you know, can you get a loan? Things like that.

Char Miller 55:19

I think you just answered your own question.

Speaker 5 55:22

Well, I mean, the answer would be there is no housing market left because there's no banks willing to write loans and it's all cash, and people with cash who have that much money hopefully are smart enough to know to not put it all in a thing that's gonna burn.

Char Miller 55:34

Are they that smart though?

Speaker 5 55:35

No, they're buying property in Florida, so

Char Miller 55:37

Um so here's a scenario, particularly for Palisades, that and we'll see if it plays out. That those with enormous amounts of resources, and that's a portion of that population, will buy up multiple lots to build a single-family home, not unlike the trophy houses up in in Bel Air and elsewhere, which means that you'll have far fewer people there. And so all of that commercial district that was so central to the Palisades will not return. Why would a grocery store go in when the population is X percent less?

Speaker 5 56:19

And the risk is higher.

Char Miller 56:21

And the risk is higher. They won't. I mean, I know a certain mayorial candidate hopes they come back, um, but I think that scenario is more likely there. The s the flip is true in Altadena, where and and we're gonna have to watch how this plays out, but for many of the folks there for whom the land was their asset, are now facing a really difficult decision about whether because it's your bank, you cash in and leave. Or you have to get another mortgage, but how can you get a mortgage if you don't have the resources that a bank is willing to lend to you? Right. No, and I think so so uh without seeming callous, I do think that insurance companies actually have a huge role to play, as they do in the Mississippi River floodplain. You cannot get insurance in that floodplain. And if we can do that with floods, why the can't we do it with fire? The risk, we know what the risk is like. It's huge.

Hitoshi Abe 57:31

One potential uh scenario that uh AIA and uh many architects are talking about is if what if we can set certain kind of uh uh quality or specification to guarantee some house can stand certain degree of fire, and then negotiate with the insurance company to set some kind of framework. It's still kind of just blah blah blah and a dream, but uh that's probably one way. So not only just the location, but the quality of the house, and then maybe then could be insurable, but I don't know.

Speaker 5 58:14

And they they hate shipping container homes in this.

Steve Aron 58:18

My timekeeper here is telling me the time is really limited, so I'll give each of you one last quick question, please, and then I want to give each of you a good, I'll give you a final remark.

Speaker 6 58:26

Sure. So your friendly neighborhood uh historical ecologist here. I'm surprised that we haven't even said the word chaparral today. Um because, and it makes me want to push back on Char's second paradigm, which is suppression. Uh, chaparral is very different from coniferous forest, and we have not successfully suppressed fire in chaparral. And um, the lessons to be learned from it, it actually puts more pressure on us on your third point of the paradigm, which is growth and where we build. Because 85% of the risk is built in once you put the structure there. All the rest of this dancing around the edges is just 15%. Um, so the difference there, and climate really isn't the driver on this fire either. Um, I was on the post-fire assessment for the Red Cross, the national attribution, and there's a little piece there about how long the drought went, but it allows us to shift blame away from the people who put the houses there. And so we shouldn't use climate as a blame-shifting thing on chaparral fires in Los Angeles. This fire could have happened a hundred years ago just as well as it happened this year. And that's the thing that we need to keep in mind, and so that's why your third point is so important. I want to thank you for it.

Steve Aron 59:36

Hold your answer, Char.

Speaker 7 59:37

Well, I want to build on what Travis Longcourt just said, and that is that you know, I'm a victim of the fire. My house did not burn, but I misplaced. And I hear you. I mean, you guys are fantastic today. I know a lot about this stuff. What is frustrating for me was hearing the governor come out and blame the environment and suspend CEQA regulations, and then the mayor and the governor saying, rebuild, rebuild, rebuild, fast, fast, fast. So we have the worst package of bills out of the state using the fires as an excuse. So, how do we get this information that we're all hearing today, which makes me afraid to go back to where I live, to those decision makers in the state and locally, so they stop doing this blame game, or you know, as we're hearing here, blaming the climate when these kinds of fires are going to keep happening with these intensities, and we're all gonna keep losing our homes.

Char Miller 1:00:37

Again, a good answer to your own question.

Steve Aron 1:00:40

So, um, unless anyone has specific things they want to add, let me uh let me finalize. And first of all, thank you all for wonderful presentations and and conversation here. Um, but maybe I'll give you a chance to I who used the word pipe dream before, I'll give you all a pipe dream.

Gerald Clarke 1:00:59

Okay, so I I've been holding my hand like this. I have two things to say. Uh first of all, let me say that amnesia uh uh is a is a problem that we learned, and um, you know, native people aren't uh immune to that either. And in my community, I live in an old house, and all the old houses are built down low, and all the recent houses are built up on uh hilltops for the view, obviously. And then these people turn around and complain about the the wind, you know, it's because they forget, they forget, right? We all forget. So uh one thing I could recommend is this is a power that you have. Don't let people forget, right? This is really important thing, and then the second thing is uh what can we do in the future? Infrastructure, right? Uh we haven't talked about water, right? So, water infrastructure, I think, is important, and we've all been told it's too expensive to bury power lines, right? And that now look at look at the bill that we're facing, right? So I think those are two things I think in the future. That's that's kind of what I'm thinking about.

Steve Aron 1:02:00

One pipe dream is the power lines.

Gerald Clarke 1:02:03

Yeah, let's let's get the infrastructure in place.

Steve Aron 1:02:06

Your pipe dream Char.

Char Miller 1:02:08

Well, some of it is is to figure out how to manage retreat. Um, I think I know how it can be done through incentives. That's why you do it with willing sellers as opposed to eminent domain. Uh, it's been done for almost a century. The federal government has gone to willing sellers uh in the 1910s and 20s to create what are now the Eastern National Forest. All of those were produced through willing sellers. Uh the 1930s, we we went in and bought out sub-marginal land, millions of acres, so that people could get off of land that could not, in fact, sustain them, never could have sustained them. So we have a tradition of that process. Here's a way in which we could also do it for Los Angeles. Um, but I would also suggest that that to pick up on Gerald's point about about sort of the educative notion. Uh, we're in a university, so let's do the work that we need to do as uh LA collaborative, um, and and as as folks who understand many of these issues is is is to not do what I saw when I got off the airplane last week at LAX. Um, and a woman in front of me is is deplaning, um, and she's wearing a sweatshirt that the back of which is emblazoned with two messages that I think are in conflict with one another. Rebuild and never forget. Dina Strong. If we rebuild, like for like, we've just forgotten those two things can't work at the same space. Um, and I think that's part of what what we've been hearing here is that that those stone monuments and not that sweatshirt tells a story that I think is far more impactful.

Hitoshi Abe 1:04:00

Um the I'm from this area, Otohoku. Actually uh came from the Sendai nearest city to the epicenter of the earthquake. So uh I was uh I was involved with a many reconstruction effort. Then this fire here. And then there are many people asking me all these things, and then I realized that the the biggest difference is the way the government is involved in this reconstruction. Uh uh I said the people I I went to the you know, the disaster site in Japan so many times, and then you know, I saw some kind of a signist saying, I want to come back live here. Because those areas were actually told by the government that cannot, you know, they cannot allow to live. So they prepared a different site uh so that they can move. The the the couple of strategies they did to avoid the this tsunami is one is they basically relocated the residential zone to higher ground. And uh so they had purchased the land and then provided alternative one. And then another one which was crazy was to raise the whole city by 10 meters, like 30 feet. I thought that's crazy. And then they'd also build a gigantic seawall, which is more crazy because then you don't see an ocean anymore. But uh but the thing is those are all paid by the government, and uh the role we took place was to mediate the government and local community so that the future of the community can be actually more designed by the local resident, not by the government. But it's already always difficult. But here, I don't know where to begin. Everything is kind of a put to everybody's right, so you can you're free, you can do whatever you want. But because this is a kind of a moment that you need some sort of a collective thinking and collaboration so that you can build the environment better. Because you have to invest money, then you want to have a better life than before. But it's so hard to emerge in that kind of a way, and I don't know how to get there still.

Steve Aron 1:06:33

That wasn't a pipe dream. That was not what I asked for. Um, in any case, though, I want to um thank our three speakers for their really um important remarks. Um, as was as was mentioned at the beginning, you know, we've done a lot of why history matters programs over the years. Um, I don't know that we've done any that are as important as what we talked about this evening, especially as we think about not only why history matters, but what kind of future uh we we have in especially in these places.

Narrator 1:07:14

Thank you for listening to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, leskincenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell, with original music by Daniel Reichmann. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.